Love and Other Consolation Prizes(100)

That’s when I decided to write this story.

Because of mysteries like these, Ernest became yet another one of my imaginary friends. And on the blank canvas of his life, I set off to render his tale, which in my world begins in Southern China during a time when workers were being smuggled into North America despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Young women were still being sold as Mui Tsai in China, or Karayuki-san in Japan, often ending up in the United States, where they worked as slaves or indentured servants, more than fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Due to prejudice, and perhaps barriers of language and culture, the plight of these girls was ignored by all but the most intrepid of heroes, like Donaldina Cameron, who rescued more than three thousand Asian girls in San Francisco. The “Angry Angel of Chinatown” would remain busy until 1910 when the Mann Act made it a crime to transport white women across borders for the purpose of debauchery.

In reality, the Mann Act was used to prevent interracial relationships. World champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson was prosecuted under the Mann Act for dating white women.

Sadly, only after the Mann Act did women of color catch a break.

The tragically true stories of these women inspired Fahn and Gracie. Together they represent a lost generation of women who endured unspeakable hardships.

Someone braver than me should kick over that particular rock and write a novel about this darker side, the one explored in the play Broken Blossoms, or the powerful Japanese film Sandakan No. 8.

I’m afraid my heart’s not up to the task.

Instead, I went down the velveteen-rabbit hole of Seattle’s Garment District, where the confluence of an early suffrage movement and the lifestyles of high-paid sophisticates created a river of new possibilities.

Seattle’s red-light district was a gray area of morality and economics, as elite companionship was somewhat acceptable, while a four-hundred-room crib joint built by Mayor Hiram Gill and his chief of police, Charles “Wappy” Wappenstein, was not.

Or as the great Western philosophers Cheap Trick once sang, “Surrender, but don’t give yourself away.”

These are the murky waters where Dame Florence Nettleton came to life, loosely based on the notorious Seattle madam Lou Graham, who, for decades, occupied a special rung on the ladders of business and governance.

I had a vague understanding of the red-light district, mainly from taking a tour of the Seattle Underground—a network of old tunnels and basements—and hearing stories about Seattle’s most famous madam.

I’d later read how Madam Lou, known as the “Queen of the Lava Beds,” had created “a discreet establishment for the silk-top-hat-and-frock-coat set to indulge in good drink, lively political discussions, and, upstairs, ribald pleasures—all free to government representatives.”

Madam Lou, along with her “housekeeper,” Amber, held court in a lavish brothel in the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. They also had a daughter, Ulna, who was left behind when her guardians moved to San Francisco. When Madam Lou died a month later of a mysterious ailment (rumored to be an occupational disease), the absence of a will meant that Amber got nothing, and Ulna ended up in a convent. Meanwhile, Lou’s entire fortune, estimated at $200,000—roughly $5 million today—was donated to the King County school system.

You’re welcome, kids.

That’s the legend, and the stories about Madam Lou tend to focus on her wealth, her connections to banks, and her propriety—if you will—in that she supported the continued education of the women who worked for her.

But in general, the stories were all about Madam Lou.

What I hadn’t explored were the social conventions that might lead a woman (or young girl) into the employ of a place like the Tenderloin, or the Tangerine, beyond the stereotypes of addiction, abuse, or mental illness, which are often exaggerated for effect as much as the tall tales of Madam Lou’s vast financial empire.

In reading The Story of Yamada Waka: From Prostitute to Feminist Pioneer, and also Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, the autobiography of Mrs. L. P. Ray (a former slave who ministered to the homeless in Seattle), it’s clear that there’s no definitive answer. But instead a rogue’s gallery of societal pressures that contributed in varying proportions to the difficulty of simply being born without a Y chromosome in the early twentieth century—abject poverty, lack of education, an appalling age of consent (as low as ten years old), religious condemnation, tribal shaming toward unmarried women who dared to (gasp) be sexually active, illegality of information pertaining to birth control, vicious wage gaps.

Oh, and racism.

While Madam Lou made a killing in the stock market, the Japanese and Chinese cribs often worked their girls, literally, to death—and local police looked the other way.

But beyond the peculiar and glamorous world of Madam Lou Graham and the red-light district was a revelation and a question. Why did frontier cities in the West have the most successful suffrage campaigns while also being hotbeds for vice?

It’s a challenging, mind-bending question.

While you’re thinking about that, I should mention that I once had a job interview in the Washington Court Building, the brick establishment built by Madam Lou and the physical blueprint for the Tenderloin.

It’s a nice place, but it could really use a piano.

Finally, there’s the metaphorical moon-rock of the Century 21 Expo, which featured the likes of Elvis, Bobby Kennedy, Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, and John Glenn.